


so blend the turrets and shadows there

by eluvion



Category: Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys - My Chemical Romance (Album), The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys (Comic)
Genre: Angst, Battery City, Dancing, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Hurt/Comfort, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, Insomnia, Other, Silence, This is just me being self indulgent, basically Party has a mental breakdown and Ghoul helps, dont mind me, no beta we die like men
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-28
Updated: 2020-04-28
Packaged: 2021-03-02 02:07:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,510
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23887180
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eluvion/pseuds/eluvion
Summary: Party Poison hated silence. They thrived in music and art, loud and unapologetic, and the fire that burned inside of them blazed high in ruin, in noise so deafening it drowns the rest of the world out. They lived and breathed beats and melodies, and they grin at every one of the thousand ribbons of passion that is inlaid in every sound. Sometimes a night is too deep. Sometimes a silence must be broken.
Relationships: Fun Ghoul/Party Poison (Danger Days)
Comments: 5
Kudos: 63





	so blend the turrets and shadows there

**Author's Note:**

> I am alive, yes. I am still in this fandom and even though I wrote gen fic, I still love funpoison because theyre so fucking cute. But I am also myself, so have some angst :)) It’s ok though, it’s short and sweet and you don’t need to worry too much I wasn’t that cruel. This is just me writing something quick and self-indulgent, so uhhh have fun :))  
>   
> Here’s my [tumblr](https://eluvion.tumblr.com/) if you want to talk/ask questions/do whatever.

Sometimes, in the dead of night, when everyone around them was fast asleep, and only the stars could see them, Party Poison would climb to the roof of the dinner and let themself cry. They would shiver like a leaf in the wind, and warm, silent tears would flow down their cheeks, like raindrops on a window, just flowing and flowing and  _ flowing  _ until they ran out. They didn’t even know why the hell they were crying, but it could have honestly been anything. The world around them was dying, and they were too. 

All of the Zones were dying, in one way or another.

No one was supposed to see what happened on the diner roof. Their crew needed them to be a leader, and they needed to keep all of this  _ away _ . Their reputation, their impact on the world around them,  _ that  _ was the only edge they had, and that advantage wouldn’t be weakened by  _ this _ . 

That night, it had been the silence that got to them. It seemed to settle around them, too much and too thick, permeating every room of the diner like water seeping into cracks. They had tossed and turned in their bed, awake,  _ too awake _ , but the quiet was  _ everywhere _ . Their heartbeat felt too loud, their breaths too ragged, and suddenly, they  _ needed _ to move. So Party had dragged themself up to the roof with a blanket wrapped tightly around them, haunting the roof like a ghost. 

When they got there, all of it had crashed in on them between one heartbeat and the next.

Everything felt so  _ heavy, _ and they barely noticed the tears until streams were coming down in rivulets, wet and warm, staining their face and soaking into their clothes. They were still quiet, still making no noise. They had, after all, mastered the art of crying silently. It was an old habit from the City.

They didn’t notice the Girl watching them from the staircase. They didn’t see her and they didn’t notice her scurry back to her room and hide away in her covers. But they  _ did  _ notice Ghoul.

He was sitting below the roof, spinning his ray gun around in his hand, and he hadn’t seemed to have noticed Party yet. He looked tired, slouched over with his black hair tied in a knot behind his head. Strands were falling out, and something in Party wanted to tuck them behind his ear.

_ Fuck.  _ They had forgotten that Ghoul was on watch. They tried, with no avail, to take it all back in, force the tears away, make everything disappear before Ghoul saw. Party looked up, and their hair fell out of their eyes, and they forced their hands to stop shaking, but  _ nothing stopped.  _

Ghoul must have heard them, because when he looked up at them on the roof, he didn’t look surprised. His voice was soft, careful, as if Party would shatter like glass. “Party?” He asked, “Are you ok?”

It was a stupid question because they clearly  _ weren’t _ , but Ghoul asked anyway. It was another way, they supposed, of asking  _ do you want me here?  _ Party swiped the tears from their eyes with one hand, the leather of their glove cold against their skin. “Yeah. No. I dunno.”

Ghoul climbed up beside them, and deliberately slowly, he wrapped an arm around Party’s shoulders. Party leaned into the warmth and let themself relax. Ghoul was warm, and something in them felt safe there. They began to shake again, quiet tears escaping their eyes like spray paint laid too thick on a wall. They were silent, but their throat felt as if it was full of broken glass. They couldn’t speak, they couldn’t make any noise.

A part of them felt as if they were back in the City, back in between white walls and trapped under static. They couldn’t make any noise, they couldn’t say  _ anything _ , because if they did, they would always be caught. They would be caught by their mother who wasn’t their mother, or the neighbors who listened to them from the apartment next to theirs, ready to intervene, or the cameras, watching, watching, always watching. They were back, trapped, where, in the dead of night, there was too much  _ fucking  _ silence. They drowned in it all, their lungs filling with static, their throat closed up by glass, and it felt like there was too much and too little of everything all at once.

Ghoul tightened his grip on them, and he pulled Party into a hug and back to reality. Party shook and shuddered against him, and it felt as if he was an anchor. He was an anchor, keeping Party from drifting into the ocean. A low sound, somewhere between a whine and a sob, escaped from the back of Party’s throat.

“Hey,” Ghoul said, and he began to use one hand to rub Party’s back. The other hand was tangled in Party’s hair, massaging their head. Party clung harder to Ghoul, burying their face in his shoulder. Ghoul’s voice is soothing, like a strange sort of balm. “It’s okay. Everything’s gonna be okay, Cherry Bomb.”

“It’s not. Nothing’s going to—” Party broke off and buried their face in Ghoul’s shoulder.

Ghoul whispered in their ear, murmuring platitudes and shushing them. They clung to him to like a burr on cloth, and eventually, they ran out of tears, and they just stayed there, buried between his arms like a seed in the dirt. Ghoul’s voice seemed to take the silence with it, blow it away and fill Party’s mind.

The City receded, and at some point, Party stopped shivering.

“Cherry Bomb,” Ghoul said when Party lifted their head. “Do you wanna talk about it?”

Party cuddled closer, this time for warmth. Ghoul took the blanket from the roof and wrapped it around both of them, trapping their body heat inside. Ghoul snuggled close, keeping his hand buried in Party’s hair. 

Party took a deep breath, taking in Ghoul’s scent. Chemicals and gunpowder, fire and sand and heat. “It’s… too quiet sometimes. Like I’m back in the City.”

They didn’t elaborate. Ghoul knew well enough what to leave below the curtain, and everyone knew that, in the Zones, your past doesn’t define you. The City most certainly didn’t define you. The past is dead and buried, deep in the folds of time, and there is no reason to go digging it up again. But, just because something was buried doesn’t mean it wouldn’t sprout again. The past was seed, not a rock. It was planted somewhere deep inside every killjoy, because the past was a motive. It was the fire that set off the bomb, and it was the thing that broke the dam. The past was another strand woven into a killjoy’s life, another part of the intricate braids that the Zones were made from.

Party knew that Ghoul knew that. 

He pulled Party up, and they stood on the roof, all the tears and pain and memories drenched on Ghoul’s shirt. The leaned against him, let Ghoul keep them up. Ghoul slipped his hand in his pocket and took out a portable radio.

“What are you doing?” they asked.

Ghoul smiled at them, and it looked fucking beautiful. Party had seen so many smiles rest on Ghoul’s face. They had seen every single one and memorized each of them, committed them to memory. They had seen Ghoul’s battle smiles, defiant and proud, bleeding arson like radiation bled from the Zones. They had seen his victorious smiles, whether it was a game or a clap or a riddle. They had memorized every line of Ghoul’s face, and this smile was one of their favorites. Soft and embarrassed, lowered eyes, and a hand brushing hair away.

He fiddled with the radio and a low tune began to come out. Party could vaguely recognize it. It was not the hard, vibrating music that they drove to, it wasn’t the defiant shrieks of the damned, but instead a quiet rhythm, soft piano music flowing like a type of strange river. 

Ghoul simply said, “You said it was too quiet.”

Something in Party’s chest felt lighter, as if Ghoul, their Ghoulie, their detonator had taken some of the heavy silence away with a thought, with an action, with a song. Heat traveled to Party’s face, and they sunk deeper into Ghoul’s chest.

He began to sway them, soft and slow, to the gentle rhythm of the song. The melody seemed to flow around them, as if it was riding the wind, cutting through the trapping white silence that haunted Party’s memories. 

It all seemed to collapse in on them, them. The exhaustion from staying up too late, the feeling of everything, every broken piece and shattered glass, coming from Party too fast, the warmth of Ghoul holding them, keeping them afloat, keeping them away from the riptide that they had sunk under. 

Ghoul pressed a kiss to Party’s neck, soft and warm, and, for the first time in a long while, Party Poison felt safe.


End file.
